1935 (white relief)

This artwork is not available to buy as a custom printThis artwork is not available to buy as a custom print

About this artwork

Nicholson's first relief painting was made on a trip to Paris in 1933. While working on a painting, part of the thick white ground chipped off, leaving two distinct layers. He exploited this accident in a series of white reliefs made in the mid-to-late 1930s, and continued to produce reliefs throughout his career. Nicholson was influenced by the purity of the works of Mondrian, whose studio he had visited in 1933. His friendships with Barbara Hepworth (they were married in 1938) and Henry Moore may also have prompted this move into three-dimensional art.

Ben Nicholson was an important pioneer of modern art in Britain, and the Gallery of Modern Art is fortunate to have an outstanding representation of his work. In addition to pieces acquired during the artist’s lifetime, a more recent bequest from his third wife, Felicitas Vogler, added no fewer than twelve paintings and a significant group of works on paper. Our collection now provides an overview of Nicholson’s remarkable achievements across six decades, ranging from his restless experiments in varying styles in the 1920s through to the calm monumentality of late reliefs made in the 1970s.

The white reliefs that Nicholson made in the 1930s are generally regarded as his most important contribution to the introduction of modernism and abstract art in Britain. His first carved reliefs date from 1933, and shortly afterwards he began to blanket the layers of wood in pure white paint. The shift from painted canvases of recognisable subjects to wooden reliefs devoid of reference and colour was a radical move. However, the austerity and simplicity of the white reliefs develops certain tendencies in his earlier work, especially the notion that painting was about making rather than imitating. For several years Nicholson had crafted artworks that drew attention to their physical presence as objects, scraping and rubbing his paint, incising lines or adding collage to create tactile surfaces that deliberately displayed the traces of the artist’s hand.

The plainness of the white reliefs is also anticipated in the clarity and freshness of his landscapes and still lifes of the 1920s and early 1930s. Although these were based on direct observation, Nicholson frequently pushed his com­positions towards abstraction, flattening space and simplifying forms. Nicholson himself said that the idea of creating reliefs originated in a happy accident when a chip of thick white ground came away as he was incising lines into a panel. But the move to carving wooden reliefs was also influenced by other factors. In 1932 Nicholson began a relationship with Barbara Hepworth, later to become his second wife, and the collaboration with a sculptor must have encouraged him to take up a chisel. His awareness of contemporary art in Europe was also important and, in particular, a visit in 1934 to the studio of Piet Mondrian probably encouraged him towards bolder and more extreme abstraction.

In our work, the composition is reduced to the most basic elements: a circle, square and rectangle, cut out to different depths from the wooden panel. The whiteness exaggerates the play of light and shadow, emphasising even the subtlest changes in surface texture. There is a kinship here to the clean white spaces and crisp lines of contemporary architecture which expressed a similar desire for order and calm. The growing turmoil and conflict that was spreading across Europe in the 1930s must also have influenced the search for what seems like a cleansing sense of brightness and purity. The white reliefs suggest a fresh beginning or, as Nicholson’s friend the artist Paul Nash put it, ‘the discovery of something like a new world’.

This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.

Ben Nicholson

Ben Nicholson

Ben Nicholson was the eldest son of the painters William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde. He did not devote himself seriously to art until 1920, the same year he married the artist Winifred Roberts. His early works were simple and traditional still lifes. In 1921 he saw an exhibition of cubist…